Hello Florian, all,
> I have to write this mail, because I feel very unhappy about the result of
> the LO-Android Tender [1].
thank you for your mail and your feedback on the tender.
Thanks for listening to my concerns.
The Android tender is a major project for TDF, and we have invested lots
of time and resources into making it happen. We are sorry that you feel
the absence of work package #3 is critical to the success of the Android
project.
Rest assured that UX is as important to the board as all other topics.
For example, just yesterday, we have published a tender for user metrics
collection, which shows our commitment to this topic.
I noticed that and I am happy you decided to set up this tender, esp. as it
seems to be inspired by:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Meetings/2014-12-10
It is great to see how our work actually affects your decision making and this
is a great appreciation for us, but especially for our users - in the end it
is all for their benefit. Thank you for that!
I would like to take the opportunity, to give some feedback on the tender in
detail, but will do so in separate mail in the next days to keep topics
focussed here.
Can you point out what major interface decisions have been taken in the
Android tender work so far that would need revisiting?
With the removal of #3 almost all complex functionality got delayed / removed
- so we can only talk about the fundamental stuff.
In a viewer the most important or fundamental feature is navigation. In the
documents viewer this navigation currently is the same as on the Desktop -
scrolling down and down and down. This has been a decision against e.g. a
page-flip navigation that people know from ebook readers.
It is currently impossible to say which of these two ways is the better one.
We need to define some external criteria to be able to judge this. And there
are even more possible options to design the navigation that have not been
chosen.
Taking a look at Spreadsheets and Presentations we suddenly find a consistent
but totally different approach on navigation - and again, there are
alternatives to this approach.
Perhaps we could even find an approach that works similar for all document
types, so people feel immediately at home anywhere in LO on Android?
The problem is a systematic one - to optimize (or evaluate, as you ask for) an
interface, it is mandatory to understand the fundamental user requirements,
e.g. who is using it for what purposes in which context? Finding answers to
these kind of questions would have been an implicit part of #3.
This is why - from a UX perspective - it so sad that #3 and consequently also
the UX competence has been left out. Even if the result of the tender is close
to the bare bone UX wise. Everything else will be built upon this.
Having said all that - I wish the best of luck for the project and truly hope
our users will love LibreOffice on their tablets and phones!
Cheers,
Björn
